Political Quotes

“Madam President, while the Parliamentarian is doing the work that is necessary at this time, I thought I would spend a few minutes talking about this amendment in the interest of saving some time. We have a significant problem in front of us as a Nation. We have before us an underlying bill that raises the debt that nobody in this room, save the pages, will ever pay a penny toward reducing--nobody except the pages and their generation will pay a penny toward reducing. This request for increasing the debt limit of $1.9 trillion, I remind my colleagues, is $200 billion more than the entire Federal Government spent in the year 1999, 10 years ago. So we, in one fell swoop, in 1 year, we are going to increase the debt by $200 billion more than what the entire Federal Government spent 10 years ago. The whole purpose behind this amendment is a wake-up call to say: Wait a minute, the Congress, in the last 2 years, under its leadership, has increased spending 11.4 percent in 2009 and 11.4 percent this year, not counting a stimulus bill and not counting omnibus bills that were not paid for because they were declared an emergency. If we add all that up, excluding the stimulus bill, we had a 28- percent increase in the size of the Federal Government in the last 2 years--just in the last 2 years. At that rate, the size of the Federal Government doubles over a 5-year period.…”